Fan sound & heating issue in MBP late-2013

[qbektrix]

My MBP Retina, 13-inch, late 2013, 2.4 i5, 8gb RAM with extended apple care is my first mac. The apple care service is useless & very rude. My past laptops were thinkpad, the thinkpad service centre was very nice. They suggested I bring the laptop for cleaning every 6 months or 1 yr and get the fan cleaned & get it checked as it was under warranty, I will not be charged anything. I just give the laptop and they remove my hd and put it in a bubble wrap packet in front of me and give it to me. They fit in back, when I go to collect the laptop.

The right-side top portion above the power button is the first part to get warm, then its the left-side top near the power adapter.Then the fan starts getting noisy. I am not sure how to measure the level of noise. But sitting in a silent room, its rather annoying. Plus looking at the activity monitor, is more confusing as the whole thing is in a tree structure with kernel_task>launchd, followed by apps. The main of chrome is not a total of all the sub-processes of chrome.

Any does the activity monitor take up 52.2% of CPU while in memory, it does not have any branch and takes 0bytes but with an energy impact of 52.4.

I am just worried as I was recently told by a friend that his mbp's fan used to be noisy and one day it just died and apple service centre told that the motherboard has died and he is better off buying a new one instead of repairing it.

My issue is the fan sound and the heating. I want to noobs guide on the cooling of a mac. What contributes to the fan noise? Is it the CPU or Memory or Energy? How to keep my MBP is best condition so that performs well for as long as possible?

 

[shardey]

The areas you mentioned where it gets hot is where the fans are expelling the heat from the heat sinks. Are you hearing an abnormal noise from the fans or is it just the fans spinning at a higher rpms? Is the 52.2.% cpu usage is from chrome? If so, have you considered using Safari instead?

The higher the temps, the louder the fans gets/spins. The only way to combat the heat is to have the fans running a higher rpm to expel the heat.

Not really a beginner approach, but these rMBP are easier to change the thermal paste than the non-retina laptops. I purchased a used early 2013 (well traded) and the first thing I did was swap the thermal paste out on both the CPU and GPU with Prolimatech PK-3. This helped reduce the temperatures but I still wanted more cooling. I added 1mm thermal pads to the entire portion of the heatsink so it transfers the heat to the bottom case, which gets much warmer than it did without them.

Of course Apple is going to recommend buying a new laptop as opposed to fixing.

 

[shaunp]

I had the same issue on two MBP laptops. Fans would ramp right up if I had an external monitor plugged in. Apple couldn't recreate the issue and their diagnostic software says there was no fault. I asked if they plugged in an external monitor, they said no because their diagnostic software said there was no issue so there was no need. I ended up having to take the laptop back home, plug in an external monitor and record a video of the issue before they would believe me. I'm now running on an ancient Thinkpad T430 and it works fine. Never had any issues with fans at all and use it with multiple monitors all day long.

If I were wipe the laptop with a clean install of Mac OS and then take a video of the problem and post it on the desktop. They cannot at this point blame it on any installed software as you only have the OS running and you have a video to prove it.

 

[shardey]

I had the same issue on two MBP laptops. Fans would ramp right up if I had an external monitor plugged in. Apple couldn't recreate the issue and their diagnostic software says there was no fault. I asked if they plugged in an external monitor, they said no because their diagnostic software said there was no issue so there was no need. I ended up having to take the laptop back home, plug in an external monitor and record a video of the issue before they would believe me. I'm now running on an ancient Thinkpad T430 and it works fine. Never had any issues with fans at all and use it with multiple monitors all day long.

If I were wipe the laptop with a clean install of Mac OS and then take a video of the problem and post it on the desktop. They cannot at this point blame it on any installed software as you only have the OS running and you have a video to prove it.

Were you using a MacBook with a dedicated video card? If so, that may be why the fans were ramping up and try using GFXcardstatus to force the iGPU instead of it dynamically switching to the dedicated card

 

[shaunp]

Were you using a MacBook with a dedicated video card? If so, that may be why the fans were ramping up and try using GFXcardstatus to force the iGPU instead of it dynamically switching to the dedicated card

Yes, but it shouldn't ramp up to full speed with just a word document open. This wasn't a large 5K monitor, it was a 22" FHD display. It was so loud my customer asked me to turn my laptop off as it was disturbing the office. Even integrated graphics should be able to deal with the workload I was doing. Let's put it this way the T430 I am using now I have connected to 2 x FHD displays and it is silent. I'm also running more graphical content now than I was with the MacBook at the time.

After Apple 'Fixed' the issue I sold the MacBook, and a few months later Apple acknowledged there was an issue with the GPU on this version of the MBP.

 

[shardey]

Yes, but it shouldn't ramp up to full speed with just a word document open. This wasn't a large 5K monitor, it was a 22" FHD display. It was so loud my customer asked me to turn my laptop off as it was disturbing the office. Even integrated graphics should be able to deal with the workload I was doing. Let's put it this way the T430 I am using now I have connected to 2 x FHD displays and it is silent. I'm also running more graphical content now than I was with the MacBook at the time.

After Apple 'Fixed' the issue I sold the MacBook, and a few months later Apple acknowledged there was an issue with the GPU on this version of the MBP.

You can't compare two different laptops with different OS's in this scenario. I tested my GT650m based MacBook with a FHD and UHD tvs and no matter what I did, the 650M was forced to be used. That would increase your power consumption and ramp your temperatures up causing higher fan speeds.

 

[shaunp]

You can't compare two different laptops with different OS's in this scenario. I tested my GT650m based MacBook with a FHD and UHD tvs and no matter what I did, the 650M was forced to be used. That would increase your power consumption and ramp your temperatures up causing higher fan speeds.

The problem existed with both Windows and OS X on the MBP. So, yes I can compare. The OS had nothing to do with it, it was poor manufacturing, which is why Apple later recognised the issue offered to fix MBP's with this issue under warranty as lots of users were complaining. Also why shouldn't I compare different laptops - one supposedly high-end laptop cannot handle a simple workload, but a low-end one can. It's not like I was playing games, I was using Word and Outlook. It's very simple. Over the past 25 years I've had over 10 laptops. The only ones which have had issues with the fans running at full speed under light loads or have had GPU issues have been Macs. The external build quality is great, i think the cooling is sometimes flawed, which is what leads to these kind of issues.

 

[shardey]

The problem existed with both Windows and OS X on the MBP. So, yes I can compare. The OS had nothing to do with it, it was poor manufacturing, which is why Apple later recognised the issue offered to fix MBP's with this issue under warranty as lots of users were complaining. Also why shouldn't I compare different laptops - one supposedly high-end laptop cannot handle a simple workload, but a low-end one can. It's not like I was playing games, I was using Word and Outlook. It's very simple. Over the past 25 years I've had over 10 laptops. The only ones which have had issues with the fans running at full speed under light loads or have had GPU issues have been Macs. The external build quality is great, i think the cooling is sometimes flawed, which is what leads to these kind of issues.

Windows on a Apple product will not use the iGPU whereas your t430 most likely is using it so it isn't comparing the same configuration. Also, did you use any type of fan control software on windows with your Mac? These laptops will run until their in the 70-80s before the fans ramp up to very high speeds.

I also notice Win8 on my MacBook will run my cpu almost full speed until it throttles itself due to thermals unless I change my power settings and/or using a fan controlling software.

 

[shaunp]

Windows on a Apple product will not use the iGPU whereas your t430 most likely is using it so it isn't comparing the same configuration. Also, did you use any type of fan control software on windows with your Mac? These laptops will run until their in the 70-80s before the fans ramp up to very high speeds.

I also notice Win8 on my MacBook will run my cpu almost full speed until it throttles itself due to thermals unless I change my power settings and/or using a fan controlling software.

Okay, you still don't get this. Under normal loads the fans would run at full speed because of a hardware fault, later confirmed by Apple as a known issue with the 2011 MBP. The only reason I compared with a PC is because we were talking about Mac build quality and I said that I've had problems with Macs but not PC's. Do you get that now?

 

[shardey]

I understand fully what you are saying but when you have an Apple laptop running Windows, it most certainly will run the dGPU instead of the iGPU.

I know running an external with windows on an Apple laptop forces the clock speeds to run at max, therefore raising the fan speeds if a certain temperature was being reach. Also, what 2011 did you have? The 15, 17"? The early or late 2011? I had the 2011 early 2.3ghz 17" without any issues while I owned it. I was speaking from experience.

No need to be a ******** when all I was doing is trying to help. Do you understand that?

 

[shaunp]

I understand fully what you are saying but when you have an Apple laptop running Windows, it most certainly will run the dGPU instead of the iGPU.

I know running an external with windows on an Apple laptop forces the clock speeds to run at max, therefore raising the fan speeds if a certain temperature was being reach. Also, what 2011 did you have? The 15, 17"? The early or late 2011? I had the 2011 early 2.3ghz 17" without any issues while I owned it. I was speaking from experience.

No need to be a ******** when all I was doing is trying to help. Do you understand that?

Actually, it didn't come across as if you weren't trying to help at all....

 

[Samuelsan2001]

You can't compare two different laptops with different OS's in this scenario. I tested my GT650m based MacBook with a FHD and UHD tvs and no matter what I did, the 650M was forced to be used. That would increase your power consumption and ramp your temperatures up causing higher fan speeds.

That’s because all the video outputs are connected to the dedicated graphics card as is the way with dedicated graphics cards in laptops, not a lot of point having a desktop replacement that can’t use its dGPU with an external screen.